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The Great Unknown : Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science / Marcus Du Sautoy

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The Great Unknown : Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science / Marcus Du Sautoy ALSO BY MARCS D SATOY The Music of the Primes: Why an nsolved Problem in Mathematics Matters The Numbers Mystery: A Mathematical Odyssey through Everyday Life Symmetry: A Journey into the Patterns of Nature IKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com Copyright © 2016 by Marcus du Sautoy Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. First published in Great Britain as What We Cannot Know by 4th Estate, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Du Sautoy, Marcus, author. Title: The great unknown : seven journeys to the frontiers of science / Marcus du Sautoy. Description: New York : iking, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016056835 (print) | LCCN 2017004682 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735221802 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735221819 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Discoveries in science. | Knowledge, Theory of. Classification: LCC Q180.55.D57 D85 2017 (print) | LCC Q180.55.D57 (ebook) | DDC 500—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056835 ersion_2 To my parents, who started me on my journey to the edge of knowledge CONTENTS Also by Marcus du Sautoy Title Page Copyright Dedication ZERO: THE KNOWN NKNOWNS FIRST EDGE: CHAOS SECOND EDGE: MATTER THIRD EDGE: QANTM PHYSICS FORTH EDGE: THE NIERSE FIFTH EDGE: TIME SIXTH EDGE: CONSCIOSNESS SEENTH EDGE: INFINITY BEYOND THE EDGE Acknowledgments Further Reading Index Illustration Credits ZERO THE KNOWN NKNOWNS 0 Everyone by nature desires to know. —Aristotle, M etaphysics ERY WEEK, headlines announce new breakthroughs in our understanding of the E universe, new technologies that will transform our environment, new medical advances that will extend our lives. Science is giving us unprecedented insights into some of the big questions that have challenged humanity ever since we’ve been able to formulate them. Where did we come from? What is the ultimate destiny of the universe? What are the building blocks of the physical world? How does a collection of cells become conscious? In the last ten years alone we’ve landed a spaceship on a comet, built robots that can create their own language, used stem cells to repair the pancreas of diabetic patients, discovered how to use the power of thought to manipulate a robotic arm, and sequenced the DNA of a 50,000-year-old cave girl. Science magazines are bursting with the latest breakthroughs emerging from the world’s laboratories. We know so much. Science is our best weapon in our fight against fate. Instead of giving in to the ravages of disease and natural disaster, we have created vaccines to combat deadly viruses like polio and Ebola. As the world’s population continues to escalate, scientific advances provide the best hope of feeding the 9.6 billion people who are projected to be alive in 2050. Science warns us about the deadly impact we are having on our environment and gives us the chance to do something about it before it is too late. An asteroid might have wiped out the dinosaurs, but science is our best shield against any future direct hits. In the human race’s constant battle with death, science is its best ally. Science is king not only when it comes to our fight for survival but also in improving our quality of life. We are able to communicate with friends and family across vast distances. We have created virtual worlds to which we can escape in our leisure time and we can re- create in our living rooms the great performances of Mozart, Miles, and Metallica at the press of a button. The desire to know is programmed into the human psyche. Early humans with a thirst for knowledge were the ones who survived to transform their environment. Those not driven by that craving were left behind. Evolution has favored the mind that wants to know the secrets of how the universe works. The adrenaline rush that accompanies the discovery of new knowledge is nature’s way of telling us that the desire to know is as important as the drive to reproduce. As Aristotle suggested in the opening line of Metaphysics, understanding how the world works is a basic human need. When I was a schoolkid, science very quickly captivated me. I fell in love with its extraordinary power to reveal the workings of the universe. The fantastic stories that my science teachers told me seemed even more fanciful than the fiction I’d been reading at home. I persuaded my parents to buy me a subscription to New Scientist and devoured Scientific American in our local library. I hogged the television each week to watch episodes of Horizon and Tomorrow’s World. I was enthralled by Jacob Bronowski’s Ascent of Man, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, and Jonathan Miller’s Body in Question. Every Christmas, the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures provided a dollop of science alongside our family turkey. My stocking was stuffed with books by George Gamow and Richard Feynman. It was a heady time, with new breakthroughs announced each week. Alongside these stories of discovery, I began to get fired up by the untold tales. What we knew lay in the past but we didn’t yet know the future, my future. I became obsessed with the puzzle books of Martin Gardner that my math teacher gave me. The excitement of wrestling with a conundrum and the sudden release of euphoria as I cracked each puzzle got me addicted to the drug of discovery. Those puzzles were my training ground for the greater challenge of tackling questions that didn’t have an answer in the back of the book. It was the unanswered questions, the mathematical mysteries and scientific puzzles that no one had cracked, that would become the fuel for my life as a scientist. It is quite extraordinary how much more we have understood about the universe even in the half century that I’ve been alive. Technology has extended our senses so we can see things that were beyond the conception of the scientists who excited me as a kid. A new range of telescopes that look out at the night sky enabled us to discover planets like Earth that could be home to intelligent life. They have revealed the amazing fact that three quarters of the way into the lifetime of our universe, its expansion started to accelerate. I remember reading as a kid that we were in for a big crunch, but now it seems that we have a completely different future awaiting us. Particle colliders like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN have allowed us to penetrate the inner workings of matter itself, revealing new particles—like the top quark discovered in 1994 and the Higgs boson discovered in 2012—that were bits of speculative mathematics when I was reading my New Scientist at school. And since the early ’90s the fMRI scanner has allowed us to look inside the brain and discover things that were not even considered part of the remit of science when I was a kid back in the ’70s. The brain was the preserve of philosophers and theologians, but today technology can reveal when you are thinking about Jennifer Aniston or predict what you are going to do next even before you know it yourself. Biology has seen an explosion of breakthroughs. In 2003 it was announced that scientists had mapped an entire human DNA sequence consisting of 3 billion letters of genetic code. In 2011 the complete neuronal network of the C. elegans worm was published, providing a complete picture of how the 302 neurons in the worm are connected. Chemists, too, have been breaking new territory. A totally new form of carbon was discovered in 1985, which binds together like a football; and chemists surprised us again in 2003 by creating the first examples of graphene, showing how carbon can form a honeycomb lattice one atom thick. In my lifetime the subject to which I would eventually dedicate myself, mathematics, has seen some of the great enigmas finally resolved: Fermat’s Last Theorem and the Poincaré conjecture, two challenges that had outfoxed generations of mathematicians. New mathematical tools and insights have opened up hidden pathways to navigate the mathematical universe. Keeping up with all these new advances, let alone making your own contribution, is a challenge in its own right. A few years ago I got a new job title to add to my role as a professor of mathematics at Oxford: the Simonyi Professor for the Public nderstanding of Science. There seems to be a belief that with such a title I should know it all. People ring me up expecting me to know the answer to every scientific question. Shortly after I’d accepted the job, the Nobel Prize for medicine was announced. A journalist called, hoping for an explanation of the breakthrough that was being rewarded: the importance of telomeres. Biology has never been my strong point, but I was sitting in front of my computer screen and so I’m embarrassed to admit I got the Wikipedia page up on telomeres and, after a quick scan, proceeded to explain authoritatively that they are the bit of genetic code at the end of our chromosomes that controls aging, among other things. The technology we have at our fingertips has increased that sense that we have the potential to know anything.
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